Day 25 - A character you can relate to the most. 

Good Lord, what a question after 50 years of reading!  *LOL*  I shall take the easy way out and chose my childhood heroine, Trixie Belden.  I've already talked about Trixie in previous days of this challenge.  

Trixie was cool.  During the books she was 13 and 14 years old, which suited my preteen sensibilities perfectly.  She was the only girl in a family of 4 siblings.  Two older brothers and a younger brother.  As an only child, I envied that.  She had a special group of friends and they formed a club named The Bob-Whites of the Glen.  And she solved mysteries. 

Well, that doesn't sound like she and I had anything in common, but the thing is, Trixie made mistakes.  She blurted things out without thinking sometimes, things that came from a good place but came out wrong.  She had a temper.  She rushed to judgement at times but was always quick to apologise when she was wrong.  She disagreed with her parents sometimes and got in trouble.  She did chores.  She was a regular gal and THAT is what I related to.  

(And really, she was much cooler than that other teenage detective, Nancy Drew.)  

Day 21 - Favourite book from your childhood.

I chose two of my absolute favourites.  The first one is my favourite of the Trixie Belden Mysteries.  The Mystery of the Emeralds.  The best teenage detective EVER, Trixie and her friends and family kept me company all through my childhood.  I wanted to be her so badly.  :)  I could relate much better to the 13/14-year old Trixie than I could to 18 year old Nancy Drew who always seemed so superior and never did anything wrong. Trixie did a lot wrong.  :)  She lost her temper, made bad choices, and she wasn't the greatest student ever.  She hated her chores.  But she loved her family and friends, she wanted to help everyone, she had street smarts and intuition.  And she always tried to do her best.  

The second book is The White Riders by Monica Edwards.  It was the first Edwards book I read back as a kid and I fell in love instantly with Tamzin, Rissa, Roger and Meryon.  Then I found out it was one of a series, The Romney Marsh series.  And it was connected to the Punchbowl Farm series where the foursome was friends with the Thornton family.   These kids had adventures, solved mysteries, solved problems, had horses and all kinds of animals.  This was how I imagined life for kids over in England.  :)   I read both of these series' and the Trixie books over and over again.  Even to this day I will read them.  

10: A book that reminds you of home.

Are you kidding me? What a question to ask someone who is a bookish adult who used to be a bookish child. I measure my life in the books that I have read and loved. Someday, when I've completely grown up and retired, I plan to write a bookish memoir, for myself and maybe for my daughter who loves books with the same kind of passion that I do, to unpack all of these memories and thoughts and the meandering wonderment of what will someday be a half-century of constant reading.

So, where do I begin, right?

-This was always one of my favorite Trixie books growing up. I am not surprised to learn that ghostwriter Nicolete Meredith Stack was originally an Iowegian, because the Iowa sheep farm setting always seemed like it must be someone's personal interest.

- All of a sudden everyone makes a lot of Biblical references. This wouldn't be strange if it weren't the first time that any of them had done so. Well, aside from the characters who are new in this book, and were presumably making Biblical references before the Bob-Whites arrived.

- The Obligatory Romance Subplot is at least handled a little more subtly than in The Mysterious Code. Trixie has obviously internalized the idea that being a tomboy is bad and reproaches herself for it all the time, which makes me sad, but I like that she tries some new things and then decides what she's comfortable with. When a local boy she meets tries to police her from the opposite perspective and says that he was interested in her until she started acting like a girl and makes unfavorable comparisons with Honey and Di, Trixie shuts him right down. Jim, by contrast, affirms her choices and is a much better Obligatory Heterosexual Love interest, even though the scene with the ID bracelet is weirdly possessive and ends the book on a sour note to me.

- Unlike Trixie/Jim, Honey/Brian and Di/Mart are completely implausible pairings and I don't seriously believe they would really date each other.

According to this article examining the Trixie Belden Authorship Question, the unknown ghostwriter who penned this particular volume never contributed any further efforts. Which is probably for the best.

- It's got to suck when you're forced to leave New York City for a small town in the Hudson Valley and then all those hicks you look down on make fun of your cowboy boots.

- Wait, cowboy boots? Yeah, Dan Mangan belongs to a gang called…The Cowhands. They wear cowboy boots and have their gang name painted on the back of their eponymous black jackets. It's pretty embarrassing. To be fair, The Mysterious Visitor's depiction of Skid Row was also pretty embarrassing, so it's not just ghostwriters perpetuating bizarre depictions of the criminal underclass.

- All of a sudden Trixie and Honey have always had penpals in Mexico. And sent them books for their school library. Which subsequently burned in a fire. It's ice carnival time!

- Actually this book reads as though its plot elements were drawn directly from the previous ghostwriter's maiden effort: the gang element, the fundraising event, the one boy in particular who bickers with the Bob-Whites throughout the book. Unlike Tad Williams, however, Dan Mangan gets rushed into full-on club membership, and equally quickly shuffled offstage at the beginning of nearly every subsequent book. I bet the editors really wished they had penciled in a change to the ending of this book.